In the finest Puritan tradition, Middlesex District Attorney Gerald Leone is crusading to save Harvard Square from the shock and awe of the nude human form. The next act of this absurd political-theater production will return to Cambridge District Court this Friday, at considerable expense to taxpayers.

Most of the street performers in the Square are innocuous, but some can be edgy. On June 25, 2005, street performer and political activist Ria Ora danced naked in the Pit. It wasn’t gratuitous nudity; she purported to be denouncing the commercialization of Christmas on the half-year anniversary of that holiday.

But Ora’s nude dancing apparently offended an employee of the Out of Town News kiosk, who called the cops. The officers arrested Ora and persuaded the Cambridge District Court clerk to issue a complaint against her for “open and gross lewdness.”

Judge Severlin Singleton III dismissed the charges the first time around, reasoning that the lewdness law as written is “[a] blanket prohibition against public nudity” that unconstitutionally “proscribes expressive conduct protected by the First Amendment.” When the DA appealed, the Supreme Judicial Court (SJC) reversed Singleton’s decision. That appellate ruling not only prolongs the case against Ora, it makes it harder for adventurous street performers to express themselves.

According to the SJC, the lewdness law may be invoked only if two conditions co-exist: the “lewdness” (in the Ora case, nudity) is “imposed on an unsuspecting or unwilling audience,” and “the display of nudity [is] intentional, done in a manner to produce alarm or shock, and actually [produces] alarm or shock.”

Almost all street-performance art, including art that is conceivably offensive to some audience member, is by its nature “imposed on an unsuspecting or unwilling audience.” But why should we single out Ora’s performance — given the Square’s off-beat atmosphere — as being particularly alarming or shocking, and leave it unprotected under the First Amendment?

The SJC has given the DA another chance to fit the facts into a narrowed reading of the law, but successful prosecution still seems unlikely. Many forms of expression, after all, “produce alarm or shock” — including nudity in such familiar contexts as movies — but are nonetheless protected.

In one famous example, a young anti-war protester, Paul Cohen, was convicted in 1968 for wearing a jacket emblazoned with FUCK THE DRAFT inside the Los Angeles Courthouse. The US Supreme Court threw out his conviction in Cohen v. California, in part because the justices recognized that his use of “fuck,” shocking though it may be to an involuntary audience, was integral to his forceful political message. As Justice John Marshall Harlan observed in Cohen, perceptions of offense are always subjective; indeed, “one man’s vulgarity is another’s lyric.”

The SJC’s attempt to determine whether a public act is alarming or shocking, and therefore potentially lewd and prosecutable, does not seem to jibe with Cohen’s recognition that shocking the audience is one function of free expression — not a ground for censorship. Still, the SJC’s definitions will govern the “open and gross lewdness” prosecution on Friday.

Justice on the hoof The case of a political activist busted three years ago for a naked dance in Harvard Square, has ended with a whimper.

Newspapers censor Bono’s ‘fucking’ gaffe Why does our ostensibly “free” press insist on acting like prudes or cowards when reporting stories for which it’s vital that readers learn someone said “fuck” rather than an undefined “expletive”?

Parody flunks out Artist Barry Blitt’s brilliant illustration — which sought to satirize the naysayers who portray Obama as a flag-burning, unpatriotic Muslim and his wife as a black-power radical — cut to the core of today’s political paradox.

Will Beacon Hill be bullied into enacting a politically correct law? A case of high-school bullying in South Hadley ended in tragedy this past January when the alleged victim, a freshman girl, committed suicide. Now, ramped up by the outrage over the case, Massachusetts legislators are in danger of enacting a politically correct law that could have devastating effects on our free speech.

Pardons are forever Prediction: Before leaving office, President Bush will issue a shockingly large number of presidential pardons to operatives who, with the administration’s blessing, ventured far outside the law to wage Bush’s “war on terror.” Who might need - and get - a pardon?: Legal advisers, high-level officials, covert operatives. By Harvey Silverglate

Flashbacks: June 23, 2006 These selections, culled from our back files, were compiled by Doug Fleischer, Sam MacLaughlin, and Hannah Van-Susteren.

Elena Kagan’s shaky record As a potential Obama nominee for Supreme Court justice, Elena Kagan has liberal bona fides and the likely support of the right. But if her record is any indication, she’s more likely to side with the conservative bloc on matters of executive power and war-time presidential authority.

Free speech for me, but not for thee Last Thursday's Supreme Court opinion striking down corporate campaign advertising restrictions might as well have been divorce papers in the rocky marriage between the political left and the First Amendment.

Speak no evil? Anthony Lewis's free-speech credentials are impeccable: among other things, the former New York Times columnist is James Madison Visiting Professor of First Amendment Issues at Columbia University's Journalism School

Springboard In “ Kicking and Screaming ,” Adam Reilly did not mention the most critical piece of the party-unity puzzle: the fact that our late-September primary is almost last on the national calendar.

NAKED IN THE PUBLIC SQUARE | June 25, 2008 In the finest Puritan tradition, Middlesex District Attorney Gerald Leone is crusading to save Harvard Square from the shock and awe of the nude human form.

ECHOES OF RODNEY KING | February 21, 2008 When Simon Glik used his cell phone to record Boston police officers making what he thought was an overly forceful arrest on Tremont Street, he didn’t think he would be the one who ended up in the back of a police cruiser.